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Who gets to Octocore?
Need some asset management help. We have 4 desktops divided up between 31/2 people.
A year old quad core Mac Pro with 4 gigs of ram Kona LH. -This is used by our broadcast editor; lots of multicam work. 60 min timelines with multiple layers of graphics, and a little bit of HD
A Quad core G5 4gigs of Ram AJA IO; used by our After Effects artist, who also does some low level graphic (supers) builds in Final Cut. Almost no HD
A brand new octocore with 8 gigs of Ram Kona LH; used by the promotion producer, lots of Motion some After Effects, some HD.
A Dual 2.0 G5 2 gigs of ram with Kona LS used as a capture and compressing machine, and some editing by youth department of the church. No HD.
What computer should be paired with what person?
I’m the one with the octo-core, but my conscience is saying it might could be put to better use. What are the thoughts of the Herd?Thank You and God Bless
Don Walker -
2 Replies
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Who does the most rendering/encoding.
Just buy another 8-core and give that to #2. 🙂
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Not too difficult. The AE guy gets it, assuming he is on CS3 or has nucleo on a previous version. Use qmaster to make it a rendering node for compressor as well, and you’ll be making it 100% efficient. Don’t forget to turn on distributed processing on AE CS3.
https://barefeats.com/imacal4.html
The quad might actually be faster in FCP depending on what speed octo it is. Quad 3 @ 3 ghz beats octo 2.8 in a surprising number of benchmarks. (non cpu-intensive) Bus speed is king for most video operations today. You will get a boost from running system level I/O on 8 cores, and that usually makes up the gain, but there’s no significant benefit to FCP on an octo today vs. a 4 except for compressor.
FCP is NOT multithreaded well. Renders of all sorts use half of my Quad’s CPU or less, quite often.
https://barefeats.com/octopro5.html
As you can see from the above, during render FCP is using 125% (1.25 processors of 8) and motion is using 57% — less than 1.) I quite often render FCP in the background and use photoshop and work (but not render) in AE in the foreground without noticing any performance hit.
As appreciative as I am of the benchmarks at barefeats, I can’t fathom a workflow that would allow you to render in 4 different apps at once very often.. Talk about an organizational genius.. 🙂 Unfortunately, he didn’t do FCP render vs FCP render, which would have been helpful. (Maybe it’s there and I didn’t find it…)
The caveat, of course, is workflow. If you spend a lot of your day rendering AND doing other processor intensive stuff (AE, etc.) WHILE you render, then certainly, the 8 core might be an advantage, but based on the information given, without knowing HOW MUCH AE your AE guy does, it certainly would be “MOST EFFICIENT” to the AE guy, and as a render node for compressor.
Cory
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